Steve Goss: Programming and Repertoire: Why do we play the music we play? (Jan 8) Questions / Suggestions
Hellooo everybody! Happy new year to all of you and welcome back to the tonebase Live and Community! 
Coming up in this exciting first week of January we have the great master himself, Prof. Steven Goss, joining us for another exciting livestream! And this one, my friends, will be all about repertoire, programming and the "classical guitar canon" - not referring to the musical form, but rather the term's other meaning as a "representative body of works"!
This marks the first in a series of repertoire-related livestreams this month! Following Steve's workshop, we will be joined by Jiji Kim on Sunday, who will be talking about her specific strategy for learning new music and expanding your repertoire! Looking forward to everything so much 
Find the start time in your time zone by clicking the photo or following this event link:
https://app.tonebase.co/guitar/live/player/steve-goss-programming-repertoire
Click here to download the PowerPoint slides used in this livestream.
We are going to be using this thread to gather suggestions and questions!
- What questions do you have on this topic?
- Any particular area you would like me to focus on?
Forum questions will be answered first!
How did the guitar’s ‘standard’ repertoire come into being and how does it grow, change, and develop? Why are some works played a great deal and other not at all? And who gets to decide all this? How does our training affect what we end up learning and performing? After discussing the nature of our repertoire, I shall talk about issues of programming - traditions, trends, and anomalies. This workshop should give everyone, at every level, something to think about.
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Is there, in your view, any piece or set of pieces (studies, for example) that every professional guitarist should be able to play anytime? Something we can´t afford not to have in our repertoire? THANK YOU.
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Probably the most difficult thing is to choose new music for the guitar, I guess it's always a kind of lottery ...
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As a passionate amateur guitarist, I find it difficult to find new music at the early/intermediate level outside of the Canon...any suggestions?
Peter, Home, Illinois, USA
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Peter Kuchinke As a fellow amateur, I'll offer an opinion. It seems to me there's a great deal of reasonably easy repertoire that, if not exactly outside the 'canon', is at least relatively unknown. It's not all of the highest artistic quality, but - again as an amateur - I see nothing wrong with that. (I'm willing to leave the 'masterpieces' to performers more masterful than myself!) I have in mind both the music of minor guitar composers like Molino and Gragnani, as well as the smaller works (generally intended for amateurs) of better known composers like Sor and Coste. There are of course many others - in IMSLP you can a wealth of obscure but often quite pleasant music of only intermediate difficulty. There is also the extensive repertoire for vihuela and six-course lute, which can be adapted quite easily to guitar. If you can read from tablature, you will. have access to an incredible wealth of material. And finally, there are the many technically undemanding pieces written by certain contemporary guitarists. Kleynjans, Domeniconi and MD Pujol are three names that spring to mind, but again there are others as well. My general opinion, then, is that the guitar is in fact blessed with an extraordinary amount of music suitable for amateurs like ourselves. (Ironically, iIt's the concert artists who struggle to find adequate repertoire!)
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Just managed to watch this stream, not live, but it was really great and insightful all the same.
Peter Kuchinke It seems that one conclusion from Steve's presentation is that we should all be composing! Why not have a go?
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Hello everyone! Here is the PowerPoint file used by Steve in today's livestream, as promised earlier! (See, I don't forget every time
haha) -
Mircea Hi Mircea - are you able to convert the presentation into a pdf file as I cannot open this version supplied.
Superb live - stream last night !
Kind Regards
Dennis
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Dennis Greensmith Here it is:
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Marek Tabisz Thank you - much appreciated .
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Just a couple of comments (as I couldn't watch the stream live all the way through yesterday),
1. Do you think the reason Trinity College London & ABRSM are still moulding their syllabus around the 'Segovia' Canon categories is primarily around free copyright material availability. Why would they want to pay for modern composers for material/copyrighted material - they should - but they won't. Also they themselves are restricting the introduction of new material by only having a select group of composers/guitar players provide compositions for them. If you're not in their 'club' there will not be a wider choice of newer and diverse materials. For discussion ?
2. Point 1 also leads to the fact that teachers have to do these syllabuses so that their students can get accepted into Universities where these Canon syllabuses still prevail.
3. Prof Steve mentioned he foresaw things changing in these areas - but how ?
Again many thanks Tonebase - great informative material as usual :-)
Kind Regards
Dennis
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Dennis Greensmith
I had a look through the pieces in they had to choose from in the ABRSM the other day and noticed a few pieces by living composers, and the distribution seemed to be somewhat canonical with the addition of some others. Here it is:
https://gb.abrsm.org/media/63001/complete_guitar_syllabus.pdf
One obvious reason is that they divide the syllabus into 3 historically-based groups, with music from Renaissance/Baroque, Classical/Romantic, and "Modern"; a living composer cannot write a piece from a time other than now, although they do have some arrangements of traditional Chinese, French and other music in the first (early music) category. There's also a piece by Vincent Lindsey-Clark in one of the lower grades, which I imagine is in a Baroque style.
I also get the sense that the force of the canon is strong in such a way that there would be uproar if, for example, they had no Bach or Villa-Lobos. There seem to be enough other options though. Interestingly enough though, they STILL have Bach's Allemande from the E minor suite AND Villa-Lobos's Prelude No. 3 on their grade 7 syllabus (the only grade exam I ever did on the guitar), which I played for my exam 23 years ago!!
Another point is this canon in relation to what Steve and Mircea discussed with naming the guitar - Spanish, classical, nylon-string, Konzertgitarre etc.. While I believe they were discussing this as just an issue of nomenclature, should we be seeing music originally for steel-string guitars in such a syllabus? It's interesting to note that the syllabus specifies a nylon-string instrument.
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End of the Year Challenge: Finish Strong!
